Hackaday.io user [J. M. Hopkins] had a problem with his rocketry. Telemetry from the rockets came down to Earth via a 433MHz serial link, but picking just the bits he needed from a sea of data for later analysis on a laptop screen on bright sunny days was getting a little difficult.
His solution was to bring the serial data from his transceiver module to an ESP8266, and from that both share it over WiFi and display pertinent information via I2C to an LCD for easy reference. And he’s put the whole lot with a power supply in a rather splendid wooden case with an SMA socket on the back to attach his Yagi.
All information received from the telemetry is passed to a client connecting via Telnet over the WiFi, but pertinent information for the LCD is selected by sending it from the rocket enclosed in square brackets. We hope that the source code will be forthcoming in time.
This isn’t the first time we’ve featured rocket telemetry here at Hackaday. And we’d be missing a trick if we didn’t point out that this project is using our own Hackaday-branded Huzzah ESP8266 breakout board from the Hackaday Store.
Not a hack. He isn’t using an arduino or 3D printer.
but but but….. the booooooox?
That’s why its hack. Its 2016, duh
I made this a while ago, for my quadcopter :)
http://www.spikey.si/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Untitled-660×495.png
Wow – how did you get the colored ink to be conductive?
magic
Good idea then :)
Yes very. me and hackaday people now have something in common :D
I thought we were on April 1st. ::-D
Really, when you need to filter a data stream, why bridging whith WIFI?
It was two fold.
I wanted to view pertinent data (altitude, parachute deployment etc) while aiming my yagi at the rocket (6 element, so pretty narrow beam). This box will sit on the ground in front of me, and I can glance at the LCD time to time, and it’s easy to read.
Second is that my phone is a lot easier to bring with me (instead of worrying about tree laptop, power, bench, etc), the cell phone screen is more visible in the bright sunlight, and the WiFi allows multiple clients, so I can eventually make a real-time kerbal style control board, or attach my laptop etc.
I’m not saying the project is anything special (ESP8266 oooh aaah), but by simply attaching an APC220 to any of my microcontroller projects I now can get a telnet session on my phone/laptop/device and an LCD to display data on. Useful for pin hungry projects.
I had originally planned on doing a Bluetooth bridge, but the ESP8266 was so much cheaper, and I hadn’t played with one yet, so I figured I jump on the IoT band wagon.
Nice build; I am a sucker for wooden enclosures! :-)
Thanks.
And yes, something nice about wood that plastic enclosures just can’t compare with.